NeuroPhage Raises a $7 Million Series A Financing to Develop a Unique Disease-Modifying Approach to Treating Alzheimer’s and Other Neurodegenerative Disorders

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – February 21, 2008 – NeuroPhage Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a privately held biotechnology company advancing novel approaches for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, announced today that it has obtained $7 million of Series A equity financing. The round was funded by a undisclosed group of private biotech investors.

NeuroPhage, founded in December 2006, is committed to developing breakthrough disease-modifying therapies for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS).

The company’s innovative filamentous phage technology platform and products have been shown in extensive animal testing to address one of the culprits in the pathology of these diseases: the buildup, inside and outside nerve cells, of incorrectly folded, aggregated and ultimately neurotoxic proteins. Professor Beka Solomon, the Chair for Biotechnology of Neurodegenerative Diseases at Tel Aviv University who previously invented the vaccine for Alzheimer’s, i.e., active immunotherapy, discovered the phage-based therapeutic approach when exploring safer deliveries of immunotherapy. NeuroPhage licensed the technology platform from Tel Aviv University, Israel.

Dr. Beka Solomon summarizes the discovery, “There is extensive evidence of the negative effects of amyloid–β plaques on the surrounding neurons in the brain and the positive effect of the plaque removal. The treatment with filamentous phage shows potential for safe disaggregation of existing amyloid plaques.”

According to NeuroPhage’s Co-Founder and Co-Chief Executive Officer Hampus Hillerstrom, “Alzheimer’s remains one of the largest and most critical areas of unmet need at very high cost to our healthcare system. NeuroPhage is committed to developing a treatment to modify the course of the disease focusing on safe plaque disaggregation. We believe that NeuroPhage’s drug and platform are unique and differentiated as very few approaches can actually remove the existing plaques.”

About NeuroPhage

NeuroPhage is advancing a disease-modifying phage-based approach targeted at Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other neurodegenerative diseases. NeuroPhage was founded in 2006 by Professor Beka Solomon, a leading neuroscience researcher from Tel Aviv University and pioneer of immunotherapy for Alzheimer’s, together with a Cambridge-based entrepreneurial team. NeuroPhage has raised a total of $7.2 million in equity financings to date from private investors. NeuroPhage is based in Cambridge, MA.